Emrakul is the Titan of Corruption, the largest and most fearsome of the Eldrazi. Strictly speaking, she's the most feared being in the multiverse next to the Phyrexians. Who can stop the femme fatales?

Today we are continuing the trend of playing great planeswalkers and spells in the Mardu color pie, but in a different format. Let’s see how well we fare in the land of fast mana, turn two kills and hate cards. Let’s play some Modern.

At first I wasn’t going to be able to make this video series without Liliana of the Veil and Nahiri, the Harbinger, but MTGO user pmc graciously donated his playset of both the planeswalkers so that I may do so. So for that we at BoardState thank you, pmc.

Modern is an awesome format for anyone not playing Legacy and a way for players to continue to play with their older cards that have since rotated even beyond Frontier (which might as well be called New Extended). Not a lot of newly printed standard legal cards make a huge impact on older formats, but today we get to play one. This card not only made a huge impact on Modern but also created a whole deck around her. Let’s take a look at what Nahiri Control is all about.

The point of this deck is to muscle out Emrakul, the Aeons Torn as fast as possible utilizing Nahiri’s ultimate. Nahiri’s plus one allows us to just discard Emrakul and replace it with something more useful than a fifteen drop, so we can even start the game with Emrakul in hand if need be. Most other decks are not setup to handle a turn six 15/15 flyer that's about to gobble up six of their permanents.

Our deck is full of removal, discard, planeswalkers, and draw which is exactly what we want for our attrition style game plan. Lingering Souls and Gideon Jura basically fill the same roll as in they both afford us another way to win and to draw the attention off the other walkers and our life total. With all the shocking, fetching and “painful” card draw, we can’t really afford to take anymore damage.

The list above is roughly what I started the video series with. I did make changes as we played through some games and I did note when and why those changes were made. Let’s get to some games and Annihilate some opponents boards!

Nahiri Control Deck Tech

Match 1 vs Tron

Match 2 vs Abzan Company

Match 3 vs Bant Company

Match 4 vs Mono-White Humans

Match 5 vs 5 Color Elementals

Match 6 vs Esper Thopter Foundry

"Y'all got any permanents I can annihilate?"

As you can see from the videos, the deck has a tremendous amount of value packed inside. Some games we didn’t even need to get Nahiri on the board let alone Emrakul to win. There were a couple of games where the opponent couldn’t handle either Gideon or the spirit tokens and simply just folded. My favorite was in the match vs Esper Thopter Foundry when the opponent used Surgical Extraction on Emrakul after I discarded to Nahiri. In most games this may have been a problem, but I was still able to effectively use Nahiri for card draw and I used her ultimate in that game to search up Kambal. This easily could’ve been a Pithing Needle to stop the opponent from activating their Celestial Colonade, but I thought it prudent to search up a creature to attack with and that was really effective against their game plan.

The sideboard can be built to your liking. I personally am still unsure of what is a better card for graveyard hate: Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void. Leyline doesn’t mess with our discarding of Lingering Souls or Emrakul, but it also doesn’t have the immediate removal of the yard unless in our opening hand. Kambal, Consul of Allocation was an all-star in my eyes. He drew so much hate and rightfully so. He’s definitely not what a spell heavy deck wants to see stick around. I would like to jam another Damnation and another few cards to help out against Burn and Control. I was thinking Defense Grid for Control matchups and Sun Droplet for Burn. Although I’m a little leary of having a ton of artifacts and enchantments as a defense barrier, for opponents often have hate cards for such moments.

I super enjoyed running this deck through a gauntlet of games. I think finding out which decks that prove to be the most troublesome will deserve the most sideboard slots. I’m actually going to spend more time fine tuning the list for a more well rounded and balanced deck to take to paper tournaments. There will also be much consulting with MTGO user pmc on how do this as he recently took the deck to an RPTQ.